Samuel Wendell Williston

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Samuel Wendell Williston (July 10, 1851 – August 30, 1918) was a noted educator and paleontologist.

As a young child, Williston's family travelled to Kansas Territory in 1857 under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to help fight the extension of slavery. He was raised in Manhattan, Kansas, attended public high school there, and graduated from Kansas State Agricultural College in 1872.

In 1880, he matriculated to Yale University, where he spent several years as post-graduate student and member of the faculty. Around this time, he worked with O.C. Marsh, collecting dinosaur fossils, and proposed the first explicit model for the terrestrial origin of bird flight (i.e., that dinosaurs developed flight by running along the ground rather than jumping from trees). Williston returned to Kansas in 1890, to take a position on the faculty at the University of Kansas. In 1899, he was named the first Dean of the new School of Medicine at KU. In 1902, Williston left Kansas again, and took the chair of paleontology at the University of Chicago.

Williston was a fellow of the Geological Society of America and author of several books. The Smithsonian Institution now administers an endowment fund in his name.